pplaw wrote: > debs, > > for all it's worth, i've tried the floppies, countless downloads, and, > recently--today, the cd's; and all i have to show for the last 3 months is a > box that > boots linux, with no xwindows and no internet, yet. > > i'll be glad when i get there.
Bentley, If you've been trying three months without success, I suspect that you really will be glad when you get there. :-) I'm no expert, but I used the following email to get a relative with a very small drive started on Debian. I don't know if anything in it will help you, but if you pick up even one pointer i'ts worth the bandwidth. Naturally this was for a very small drive, so there's a lot that isn't included; but once you get the system running you can use dselect to add whatever else you need/want. John P.S. this was based on the cheapbytes Slink CD ---------------------------------------------------------------- Hi, I've been thinking about your small hard drive and decided to find out what the minimum Linux load could be and still use "Xwindows". After some testing I came up with the following plan. You'll only be loading apx 160-170 packages out of the over 2300 available, but it'll run fine on less than 200 MB. It even has a few games to play and a few graphics programs to sample. I think you said that you had a 200+ mb and an 85mb hard drive available. You could put both in your computer and use the 85 (or part of it) as the swap space. (the less memory you have in your computer, the more important the swap space is - 32MB should work fine with this small installation) Guidelines follow: NOTE: before starting you should know which graphic card /monitor you have and what the frequencies are. Follow the step-by-step procedures on the CD and use the hints/procedures below. These directions are based on only using one drive, if you use two make the entire primary drive one partition. ============================================ "How to make a small penguin" 1. Put "Binary 1" disk in your CDROM and boot from the CD. 2. Follow the step-by-step procedure. 3. When you get to the page "Initialize and Activate a swap Partition" for the first time, select "Partition a Hard Drive" 4. Delete all old partitions and make two new primary partitions. Partition (1) should be FS type Linux, bootable, beginning of disk, and it's size should be all but the space required for swap. Partition (2) should be FS Linux swap and use all the remaining space. Write it to disk when you have it where you want it. 5. When you get to the page where you select device drivers, the only drivers you need are "vfat" under FS, and "lp" under misc. 6. Select "Y" when asked if you want to chose from several selection of packages. 7. Select "Basic" from menu. 8. When 'dselect' starts and the first line "0. [A]ccess ..." is highlighted, put "Binary 2" CD in your CDROM. You're going to do all the steps 0-6 even though the previous page said to skip [S]elect. 9. In "0. [A]ccess" type none for non-free, non-US, and Local. 10. In "2. [S]elect" you'll scroll through a list of some 2300+ packages. You can tell which ones are already selected by the asterisk (*) before the name of the package, an unselected package has a dash (-). We're going to add some packages to the basic system. You add the package by pressing the (+). When you add a package, the deselect program warns you if the package you select depends on other packages to run properly. It puts the "conflict/dependency" page on the screen and (when you press the space bar) it lists what the conflicts are and/or adds whatever packages your selection needs. All you have to do is accept deselect's choices by pressing enter. In a few instances below, I'll tell you to add a package to deselects choices. They'll all show on the dependency page as recommended but not selected - you'll have to select them. Scroll down through the list and add the following: opt comm wvdial (only if you need a modem) opt games xbill opt games xdemineur opt games xfishtank opt games xjewel opt games xpat2 opt games xroach opt graphics gimp opt graphics imagemagik opt graphics pixmap opt graphics xbmbrowser (add netpbm) opt oldlibs nextaw (add nextawg) opt text magicfilter (only if you need printer) opt web gzilla (only if you need small browser) opt x11 fvwm95 opt x11 tkdesk (add tkstep4.2) opt x11 xf86setup (add the xserver you need for your graphics card) and (add xfonts-scalable) 11. Compete the rest of the installation and set-up. Note: during the set-up it'll ask you if you want xserver_vga16 to be primary - the answer is no. You want the xserver that your card needs to be primary. In my case it's xserver_svga, your xserver depends on your graphics card. 12. Sign on as root. 13. When you get a command prompt, type XF86Setup <enter>. Set up your mouse, keyboard and xwindows. 14. When XF86Setup is complete (hopefully), type startx <enter> With any luck at all, you should how have a running linux operating system. You can now tweak a few items to make life easier. You can try my hints to start with and then change things to suit yourself. Linux is very changeable. ------------------------------------------- Start by setting up "tkdesk", it's both a file browser (explorer) and editor. Use the taskbar start-xshells-tkdesk. Once tkdesk is running, edit the options by selecting the following and unselecting everything else - you'll probably set it up differently when you get used to it, but these selections work well. long listings show all files folders on top single click (Dirs) Sort by ... name ask on delete sort history dialogs at pointer number of list boxes (2) balloon help Using the TkDesk dropdown menu at the top left, toggle or hide the AppBar (you don't need it with fvwm95 - it already has a button bar). Now size it accordingly and enjoy. --------------------------------------- Once you get used to tkdesk, you can edit a few files to make your linux more friendly. The files that you need to edit are: /root/.bashrc (1) change the line (export PS1='\h:\w\$') to read (export PS1='\$'). Unless, of course, you like the trash prior to the command prompt. ;-) (2) remove the # sign in front of the five lines beginning with (#export LS_OPTIONS......) (3) (save it) /root/.profile Change your path by adding (:/usr/games) to the end of the line starting with (PATH=/usr.......) and save it. (Your games won't work from the menu until you edit your path) /etc/X11/fvwm95/system.fvwm95rc If you want your taskbar to autohide edit this file and scroll down to almost the end of the file. Look for the heading (#------------------FvwmTaskBar). At the bottom of a list of item under that heading you'll find the following line. #*FvwmTaskBarAutoHide Remove the #. ------------------------------------------- Good Luck P.S. to shut down linux use the command "shutdown -h now", don't just turn it off.. ======================================================== -- Powered by the Penguin
